JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

I’ve wondered about this but never got around to asking.

Dear Cecil:

I once saw a man on Oprah who always unplugged appliances because he didn’t want to pay for “phantom” electricity that would leak through the plug even when the appliance wasn’t being used. Recently, a coworker told my husband he saved a lot of money unplugging TVs, computers, etc. Am I really wasting money leaving appliances plugged in even if I turn them off?

The answer on The Straight Dope.

A friend’s brother was so anxious about wasting electricity that he would unplug the refrigerator whenever he left the house. So the food would spoil and he ended up wasting more than kilowatts.

The reunion of an important rock band is laden with enough emotional and literal baggage to crash an airplane. In the Philippines in the 1990s, the Eraserheads were the Beatles. Whether you bought their albums or not, you know their songs. They came at you from all sides, they got their hooks into your brain. You may not even be aware that you know them until years later you get stuck in traffic and one is played on the radio. Why do you know all the words, including the back-up vocals?

The End. in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

In his review of Timothy Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library Ritchie Robertson notes that Hitler owned 16,000 books but wonders if he bothered to read any of them.

Hitler’s library is most remarkable for what it didn’t contain. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are absent, confirming the suspicion that Hitler knew them only at second hand…The other striking absence is literature. According to Oechsner, Hitler owned all the Wild West adventure stories by Karl May, all the detective fiction of Edgar Wallace, and many love stories by Hedwig Courths-Mahler (a German Barbara Cartland), but nothing that could send the imagination along unfamiliar tracks. Hitler’s mental world seems to have had no place for imagination. Instead, he relied on a naive conception of science, on which he claimed that National Socialism was based.

Do you lose consciousness when you attempt to read Jane Austen? Can’t…focus…too many…whatyoucallem…words…looking for husbands…zzz. Here’s something for your attention span: Pride and Prejudice rendered as a series of Facebook updates.

Jeanette Winterson visits the famous Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company (It’s not the same Shakespeare and Company that’s in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, but the one in Before Sunset). The shop gives food and shelter to struggling authors who don’t mind sharing their bed with the cat. If the cat’s still there; these snapshots were taken three years ago. Sure the place needs serious vacuuming but who cares about dust mites when you’re surrounded by great literature? A-choo.

When a particle meets its antiparticle, they destroy each other. It is possible that when this interaction is not observed, particle and antiparticle survive. But no one should ever notice that it’s happening. That’s why it’s called Hardy’s Paradox.

Kazuhiro Yokota of Osaka University in Japan and his colleagues have demonstrated that Hardy’s paradox is, in fact, correct. The things Hardy predicted are real, but they can only be seen by people who are not looking. What’s the rate of alcohol consumption among quantum physicists?

At the awards lunch for the Philippine Star and National Bookstore’s “My Favorite Book” contest at Le Souffle, the jurors were asked to talk about their own favorite books. I was about to go with my default settings—The Catcher In The Rye, The Great Gatsby—but the more I thought about the question the less decisive I got. I’ve read a bunch of books since Catcher and Gatsby and loved them. There’s A Sport And A Pastime by James Salter, Love In A Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford, A Handful Of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. Dostoevsky’s The Idiot took me a year to get through, but I loved it. And Persuasion and Dune. I love Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the Old Testament, The Ogre by Michel Tournier. Catch-22 knocked me flat, as did The Age Of Innocence. Why do I have to choose? It’s like being asked to choose which one of my cats I would save from the gas chamber.

I got to thinking: Why do I read? That seemed an easier question. And I figured that I read because I only have one life and much as I love it, I don’t like the limitation. So I read books, especially novels, for the extra lives. By my reckoning, a good novel is an extra life lived. I’ve never fled Moscow at the approach of Napoleon’s army, but I know what that’s like. As a child I never met an escaped prisoner at a graveyard and helped him get away, but I know what that’s like. I didn’t personally fight in the Trojan War, figure out a way to end it, then spend ten years meeting cyclops, sirens, witches who turned my crew into swine, before getting home, but I remember the experience as if I’d lived it. That’s why I read books. Don’t make me choose one.

You can now read the transcript of the very first story conference for Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The participants were Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan. Spielberg and Lucas were just crackling with ideas, bouncing them off the walls and furniture. It all starts with a very clear idea of the hero’s character. Spielberg hated the name “Indiana”. Here’s the bit about the snakes:

Spielberg: It would be funny if, somewhere early in the movie he somehow implied that he was not afraid of snakes. Later you realize that that is one of his big fears.

Lucas: Maybe it’s better if you see early, maybe in the beginning that he’s afraid: “Oh God, I hate those snakes.” It should be slightly amusing that he hates snakes, and then he opens this up, “I can’t go down in there. Why did there have to be snakes? Anything but snakes.” You can play it for comedy.

Yeah, yeah, the last three Star Wars movies were crap and the last Indy didn’t have the wit and inventiveness of the earlier movies. You know what it is? A lot of successful people, when they get older, don’t feel like trying anymore. The hunger is gone. The challenge is to stay hungry. Ideally, without actually having to be hungry.